You can begin to establish this larger framework in your introduction by summarizing what the author basically argues. Even then, show respect for its author. Calling the author stupid, evil, or crazy may drive your readers away.
When you first read the argument, you may strongly approve or object. Let your written response include concessions and qualifications, not just big evaluative claims. Whatever your attitude toward it, show the reasoning and evidence behind your view. When writing about the argument, refer to its author. Nor is it a random series of free-floating ideas. Take opportunities to remind your readers — and yourself — of this fact. Start doing so with your introduction.
For each sentence you write, make clear whose view it expresses. Help your readers distinguish between the two. To write about an argument thoughtfully, read it several times. You may need to study it at length before you detect its points.
Just as important, recognize choices the arguer faced. To construct your map, you might use only words. Within it, we summarize what Barno says at that stage. An argument that avoids certain questions may still prove persuasive. Identify the values the argument honors. Often arguers support a claim by tying it to common values. These are principles they assume their audience already holds.
Here are examples of values that Barno emphasizes as he argues for a draft lottery: Morality. Barno uses the word moral several times.
Not only does it appear in the title of his essay, it also pops up in paragraphs 10, 11, and In paragraph 11, it even appears twice, along with the related word morally. Most, perhaps all, of his readers see worth in a moral life. Most people find it crucial to remain in touch with reality.
To support his proposal for a lottery, Barno points out deaths and woundings suffered by current volunteers. Shared sacrifice. When Barno reports the suffering that military families alone endure, he expects his readers will feel guilt. After all, shared sacrifice is a common ideal. The author joins his readers in seeking to protect it from needless risk. He refers to his own family as suffering from this plight para. Rather, he wants the country to hesitate more before waging war.
Family is something he and the nation prize. Bonds of responsibility. Barno resorts to this phrase in his final paragraph. He has faith that his readers still deem social ties important. He affirms the principle of looking out for one another. Ancient teachers of rhetoric and ethics emphasized the virtue of prudence. Today, it remains a value many arguers bring up. Related to realism and prudence is the attitude of seriousness.
Barno uses the word twice, in paragraphs 11 and By it, he means intense concern. These include the costs of war. Consider what values an argument gives priority to. Often arguers press their audience to choose between values it holds. Barno emphasizes community spirit as an American ideal, but many people in the United States cherish personal freedom as well. On plenty of occasions, the American public has debated which of these principles to favor.
Someone who prefers individual liberty might protest a military draft. Barno, however, favors one, asking his readers to put community ties over freedom of self. Identify words in the argument that can have more than one definition. You can also grasp an argument better if you pinpoint words in it that can have more than one definition. Not everyone, that is, would give these words the meanings that the arguer does. Take, for instance, morality and seriousness.
For him, both terms mean a willingness to share the risks of war. A similar difference of opinion may occur with the word caution. Barno believes a country that exercises caution would be reluctant to launch wars.
Others might think that a policy of caution involves attacking potential foes before they can ever strike. Someone might argue that the president and Congress rarely do what the public wants. Consider the various possible definitions of additional terms Barno uses, such as these: indiscipline para. We close this chapter by inviting you to practice these methods. Try applying them to the following opinion piece. In addition to her academic articles, she has contributed to the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times and to two philosophy blogs, Practical Ethics and The Splintered Mind.
Rini first published the following argument on December 8, , in Aeon, an online magazine that deals with topics in philosophy, science, psychology, health, technology, and culture at large. We all know what Juliet says about a rose: by any other name, it would smell as sweet. Across the country, student Juliets are asking their administrator Romeos to be newly baptized. And why not? It is reasonable to wish not to study in a place that honors a man who would have you keep to your own, segregated end of the lecture hall.
For students of color, living in a United States that preaches equality and practices something else, it is reasonable to expect an honest reckoning with our damaged patriarchs.
But the problem is consistency. On any reasonable scale of evil, the segregationist Wilson cannot be as bad as George Washington, who owned hundreds of slaves.
So must we also rename several universities, a northwestern state, and the District of Columbia? The last, in fact, seems to require double renaming, as Christopher Columbus is now seen as a genocidal monster.
Where does the bonfire end? Who has the time? But, in fact, we regularly give things new names. It would be worrisome if this reductio of name-changing was deemed absurd only when racism is the issue. Still, it is worth pausing to consider just what it takes to give something a name.
But not all attempted naming is felicitous. But unlike the Royal Navy, in schools and cities the authority to name does not entirely belong to a single person. Students and faculty, staff, and alumni have an interest in not seeing their college linguistically cavort with blackguards. The citizens of a democratic state have a right to call themselves as they wish. And the procedure by which we determine how to re name our collective institutions has its own name — it is called debate.
Why not have this debate, openly and honestly, rather than dismiss the entire project? The US philosopher Saul Kripke is known for his causal theory of reference. But there is nothing in this story to prevent a re-baptism, or a displacement of the old name by the same causal channels. We are links in a causal chain of reference, stretching back to institutional baptisms in and , when university administrators pointed to a college and called it Calhoun, or pointed to a school and called it Wilson.
These were performative utterances, issued with full authority, and part of their aim was to honor the legacies of dead racists. We do not have to be unthinking links in the chain. We, collectively, have the authority to pass on these names, or to replace them. Whatever we do — continue the chain or disrupt it — we are making a choice about whether to uphold the honor intended by those baptisms. In fact, the students at Princeton are not asking us to make a comprehensive judgment: Wilson, good man or bad?
The idea is to ask: does continuing to apply the name of such a person express our values, rather than the values of a gone generation? We are asking whether we, who are the only ones with the authority to keep or change the name, have good reason to pass the name on to the next generation.
We know that renaming tends to follow political revolution. Famously, Byzantium turned to Constantinople, which turned to Istanbul. We are ready to accept that names change with the times and with the politics. Or would you insist that I am writing in New Amsterdam? So if renaming can follow political revolution, then why not moral revolution? Why are we not free to ask ourselves whether to uphold the values that led our ancestors to name in honor of slaveholders and segregationists?
Perhaps we will decide, together, that on balance the good done by Washington or Wilson outweighs the evil. But I think we should seriously listen to those whose histories are most in the weighing. It can be hard, for some whose ancestors were not enslaved or segregated, to fully appreciate the pain caused by honoring these names. Yet even if you cannot understand it yourself, you can see it in others.
And perhaps this will move you to agree, as an act of civic love, to accede to their requests. What do you consider her main claim to be? Is it a simple yes or no answer to the question, or is it something else? Rini could have left the word dead out of her title. Why do you think she includes it? What are its main stages? For example, what is it doing in paragraph 2? In paragraph 4? What are these issues? Aeon wants to make big ideas accessible to a wide audience. Why, conceivably, does Rini choose to begin this way?
Where does Rini bring in evidence for her position? What kind of evidence is it? What does it consist of? In paragraphs 12 and 13, Rini uses the word values. What specific values does she promote in her essay? In paragraphs 9, 11, and 12, Rini uses the word authority.
How does she seem to define this word? To whom is she willing to give authority? Where, specifically, does she employ it? For what purpose, do you think? Apply the same questions to her use of you. In addition to her title, Rini poses several other questions in her essay. A different writer might have only made statements. What, if any, renaming events and controversies can you think of? In Texas, the name of Robert E.
Lee High School was challenged. Also in Texas, the Board of the Houston Independent School District stirred debate when it expressed interest in renaming six of its schools that bore the names of Confederate leaders. Central State University in Ohio, which had received more than two million dollars from Bill Cosby and his wife, decided to change the name of a communications building named after them.
In this chapter, we refer back to those elements and to the arguments by Goldberger and Barno as we suggest ways to develop your own effective arguments. Also good to study are features of an effective style. Try the following methods and techniques. Mark transitions. Readers want to know how each of your sentences relates to the ones immediately before it and after it.
Usually a word or two can show this. Especially crucial is the language of shifts from one paragraph to the next. Create coherence by repeating words and by using similar words.
Readers appreciate signs that you have carefully focused and structured your argument. Through repeating its key words, you can show that it follows a coherent line of thought.
Barno notably repeats the word national. It appears in paragraphs 1, 5, 9, 12, and He also uses the closely related word nation in paragraphs 10, 12, and These repetitions provide his argument with a unifying thread.
They emphasize that his readers should think about how to serve their country, not just how to satisfy themselves. Use patterns of sounds to give your sentences force. As you write a draft, read its sentences aloud. Listen to the sounds of each. Perhaps, by changing certain words in a sentence, you can create more compelling rhythmic patterns.
It uses these stylistic techniques: Alliteration. The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginnings of words. Both did and dodge begin with the letter d. Both seek and summons begin with the letter s.
The repetition of vowel sounds. Tom, not, and dodge feature the same vowel. So do Ridge, did, and his. So do parts of the last two words: un, come, sum, and mons.
Other consonant patterns. An m sound links the words Tom, unwelcome, and summons. A dg sound connects Ridge with dodge. One-syllable words. Words that consist of just one syllable can have a punchy impact, especially if several such words appear in a row.
Balance the parts of a sentence. Look at the following two sentences. Readers like rhythmic symmetry. Vary the lengths of sentences. A series of long sentences may confuse your readers while also losing their attention. On the other hand, a series of short sentences may come across as choppy, obscuring how ideas connect.
Try to mix sentence length, as Barno does in paragraph 8: Even in World War II, only a small fraction of our nearly 16 million uniformed men and women served more than three years in a combat zone, and the entire war was finished for the United States in 45 months.
Even in long sentences, be as concise as possible. Use active verbs, not just passive ones. Active and passive are terms of grammar. When a verb is in active voice, the subject of that verb performs an action. When a verb is in passive voice, its subject is acted upon. The active tends to make a sentence more dramatic and concise. Also, it better identifies who or what is doing something.
For instance, he repeatedly uses the passive form of the verb to call when he refers to the demands of military service: In his family, when you were called … para. Neither is automatically preferable. But of the two, active voice is more dynamic. When responding to an argument, use verbs that pinpoint what the arguer does. Avoid vague verbs such as talks about. A more exact alternative would be this: Barno calls for a draft lottery to stir concern about war.
The verb calls will give your readers a sharper sense of what Barno is doing when he brings up the lottery as a topic. Arguments may register more strongly with their audience if they explain ideas through figurative language. Such phrases can make concepts more vivid. Three main types are analogies, metaphors, and similes. An analogy calls attention to a similarity between two things while still regarding them as largely distinct. Barno uses this technique in paragraph Just as Americans take chances with money by investing in stocks, so should they morally consent to the possibility of being drafted.
Of course, moral codes can differ a lot from activities of the stock market. But Barno emphasizes that both require a willingness to take risks. A metaphor, on the other hand, implies that two things are the same. To put a call on hold is to keep the caller waiting. Barno uses the term to suggest that when Ridge agreed to military service, he had to postpone the kind of living he actually preferred.
A simile also equates two things but uses the word like or as to connect them. Yet soon they find themselves having to experience its terrors again. Create perspective by incongruity. This term, coined by Kenneth Burke, refers to the move that arguers perform when they give language a strikingly unconventional meaning or application. Throughout his essay, he suggests that the term better fits the present age.
Structuring Your Argument: Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay When writing an argument, you may feel tempted to follow an age-old format: the five-paragraph essay. It works like this: Your first paragraph introduces three points. Each of your next three paragraphs develops one of these points. You conclude with a paragraph that repeats these points, reminding your reader of them. No wonder that, for generations, students have relied on it. Many learn this stock procedure in junior high or earlier.
Then they expect it to serve them forever after. But rarely does such writing delight teachers of college courses. For most of them, it reeks of formula. To see what we mean by the five-paragraph model, take a look at the following essay. He worries that this policy allows the rest of the country to overlook the sacrifices that soldiers make. Barno wants the United States to be more cautious about committing itself to wars.
He thinks that we will be more restrained if more of us might have to serve in the military. First, the American people will probably never agree to it. Much of the country will object to it and demand that legislators fight against any effort to establish it. Ever since the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, our society has valued individual liberty. They would oppose a new draft. But he is too optimistic.
In recent years, the federal government has been plagued by intense disputes. The president, the Senate, and the House of Representatives seem unable to agree on any issue.
The same thing is likely to happen now. Even if they wind up with a high lottery number, rich people will use all sorts of excuses to beat the system. Everyone else will notice this and point out that the lottery is not fair. One is that the public will not appreciate it.
We think our essay makes some good observations. But its five-paragraph scheme harms it. Such limited treatment seems superficial; readers will want greater depth. Each seems a mini-essay set apart. The final paragraph seems wasteful, for it echoes points already made. So focus your essay on one main claim. Take several paragraphs to develop and support it. Link these paragraphs to one another. Put them in an order that makes sense. We could have spent an entire text on any of the flaws we found.
Think of the various questions we might have addressed. For example, what are some past governmental debates over the meanings of words? What meanings might this term have? They call for abundant explanation, reasoning, and evidence.
The author, Justin Korzack, composed it for a course on debating social issues. To support his response, he investigated presidential history. Nor, probably, is it the finest response ever written. But it does perform moves worth adding to your rhetorical repertoire.
Barno is a retired lieutenant general with a substantial combat record. Therefore, you might assume that he himself is comfortable with war.
But this is not so, at least with respect to our recent long-term conflicts. He feels that these engagements have had serious consequences for the professional soldiers required to carry them out. Also points out which claims are his. Makes him the subject of several active verbs. Obviously this measure would disrupt the lives of many people.
Whether or not they ever planned to become soldiers, they might now be forced to serve. Nevertheless, Barno believes, this threat would be worthwhile, for it would function as a brake. He expects that it would make Americans more reluctant to send troops into extensive and deadly combat campaigns. Identifies main issue by phrasing it as a question. Not really, because Barno misdiagnoses the problem in the first place.
What needs more attention and criticism is not public apathy. The President should consult more widely and thoroughly before dispatching Americans to the battlefield. The first of several concessions in this paragraph.
Barno makes a valuable contribution when he reminds his readers of how terrible war can be. Using the appeal of pathos, he stresses the suffering undergone by soldiers who have had to serve several tours of duty in deadly, traumatic places like Iraq and Afghanistan. He contrasts their experience with that of people like former governor Tom Ridge.
Even though Ridge was, after being drafted into the army, sent to fight in Vietnam, at least his time there lasted only one year. In light of this unfortunate trend, it would be understandable if Barno called for reviving the draft as a gesture of fairness. He could argue that exempting civilians from military service is morally wrong, given that the professional defenders of our nation have had to fight so much.
Not everyone would agree with him, but his position would be credible. Clear transition from previous paragraph. A somewhat different motive, however, leads Barno to suggest that a draft lottery be held every year if a military action extends beyond two months.
He makes this proposal because he feels that Americans outside the military have grown indifferent to the challenges it faces. In his view, the lottery would make civilians more conscious of combat deployments. At the same time, they would question more the necessity of going to war, for they might be drawn into combat themselves.
This skepticism is something that Barno would welcome. To him, the government has grown too inclined to hurl troops into conflicts. He wants our leaders to make such decisions more slowly and carefully. He expects the lottery would achieve this goal, by raising public awareness and concern.
Another concession, just before criticisms begin. Probably Barno is right to sense that exposing significant numbers of Americans to a draft lottery would make the country uneasier about entering into war. Some greater unrest would most likely occur.
Why must his readers assume that the public is, at present, absolutely indifferent to the ordeals faced by our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Provides supporting examples. Figurative language. Barno appears to forget that when the invasion of Iraq was beginning, thousands of people marched in several cities to protest it. Moreover, critical attitudes toward current American wars have certainly mounted in the last few years.
Perspective by incongruity. He knows that we have woken up to how fatigued we are. Begins another set of examples. Beginning with Harry S. President has asked Congress for an official declaration of war. Instead, each President has essentially used the military as he has seen fit, seeking Congressional permission only at times and only in thin ways.
Identifies two possible meanings of the same word. Richard Nixon ignored massive antiwar protests and continued to bomb the same region. Balances the two halves of the sentence. George W. But that campaign was never officially declared as a war, even though it has managed to become the longest war in American history. Moreover, the current president is similarly determined to act independently.
His recommendation is thought-provoking and based on vast military experience, but probably his readers would do better to focus on Presidential power. In military matters, the head of the country has tended to act on his instincts rather than seek meaningful advice from others. Figuring out ways to change or curb this habit seems an agenda more worthwhile than implementing the threat of a draft. More than ever, people engage in personal writing.
As we text our friends, contribute to blogs, or post on social media, millions of us update the world about our daily lives. Perhaps you regularly report on your experiences in these ways. If so, your writing often relies on the first person. Over and over, it features the pronoun I. Some of your teachers, however, may have warned you against this pronoun. Many of us recall being told to ban it from our writing.
In particular, its use was forbidden in essays meant for school. But nowadays, you might find your instructors more flexible about using I in essays. After all, it appears in countless online messages. Also, autobiography can prove to be a resource. References to yourself can help arguments you write for a course. They can inspire, support, and enliven the cases you make for your claims. It reports the anger he felt when his son faced another combat tour.
With his account, Barno identifies hardships imposed on many enlistees and their families. Not always will the first person benefit an argument. Using I may bother your readers if you merely express your feelings. I very much feel that his proposal would put many people in needless danger. I fear that his plan will just send more civilians into combat. I also dislike the idea that his draft would require people to give up their freedom.
I really value individual liberty. This constitutional right is very important to me. Readers may lose sight of the argument the writer seeks to make. They may also suspect a lack of actual evidence. The passage fails to offer real support for this claim. First-person arguments can backfire in another way. My brother Bob has done two tours of duty in Afghanistan. They have been rough for him, and he was even slightly wounded in a battle. But he has always been willing to perform his required service.
My parents, my sister, and I are also true patriots. Bob and the rest of our family prove that the enemies of our country will never defeat the American spirit. They can be appropriate for an argument essay you write. Some version of the story above might play a useful role. Arguments for Analysis We end this chapter by offering two additional arguments.
Both of them conspicuously use the first person. We tend to think that their reliance on I is justifiable.
Even so, the claims they make call for debate. We include these essays to invite your response. You might write an argument of your own about one or both of these texts. In any case, consider their main ideas, and study their techniques of persuasion. To help, we pose questions after each piece. The first originally appeared as an op-ed column in the New York Times on June 6, Author Lee Siegel b.
Besides writing five books, he has contributed essays to many newspapers and periodicals. Siegel earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia University.
My mother co-signed. When we finished, the banker, a balding man in his late 50s, congratulated us, as if I had just won some kind of award rather than signed away my young life. By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college, my mother and I had taken out a second loan, my father had declared bankruptcy and my parents had divorced.
I transferred to a state college in New Jersey, closer to home. Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.
I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans. It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college. Having opened a new life to me beyond my modest origins, the education system was now going to call in its chits and prevent me from pursuing that new life, simply because I had the misfortune of coming from modest origins.
Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral. Maybe the problem was that I had reached beyond my lower-middle-class origins and taken out loans to attend a small private college to begin with.
Or maybe, after going back to school, I should have gone into finance, or some other lucrative career. Selfdisgust and lifelong unhappiness, destroying a precious young life — all this is a small price to pay for meeting your student loan obligations. Some people will maintain that a bankrupt father, an impecunious background and impractical dreams are just the luck of the draw. Someone with character would have paid off those loans and let the chips fall where they may.
But I have found, after some decades on this earth, that the road to character is often paved with family money and family connections, not to mention 14 percent effective tax rates on seven-figure incomes.
Moneyed stumbles never seem to have much consequence. Forty years after I took out my first student loan, and 30 years after getting my last, the Department of Education is still pursuing the unpaid balance. My mother, who co-signed some of the loans, is dead.
The banks that made them have all gone under. I doubt that anyone can even find the promissory notes. Even the Internal Revenue Service understands the irrationality of pursuing someone with an unmanageable economic burden. It has a program called Offer in Compromise that allows struggling people who have fallen behind in their taxes to settle their tax debt.
The Department of Education makes it hard for you, and ugly. But it is possible to survive the life of default. You might want to follow these steps: Get as many credit cards as you can before your credit is ruined. Find a stable housing situation. Pay your rent on time so that you have a good record in that area when you do have to move.
Live with or marry someone with good credit preferably someone who shares your desperate nihilism. The reported consequences of having no credit are scare talk, to some extent.
The reliably predatory nature of American life guarantees that there will always be somebody to help you, from credit card companies charging stratospheric interest rates to subprime loans for houses and cars. Our economic system ensures that so long as you are willing to sink deeper and deeper into debt, you will keep being enthusiastically invited to play the economic game. I am sharply aware of the strongest objection to my lapse into default.
If everyone acted as I did, chaos would result. The entire structure of American higher education would change. The collection agencies retained by the Department of Education would be exposed as the greedy vultures that they are. The government would get out of the loan-making and the loan-enforcement business. Congress might even explore a special, universal education tax that would make higher education affordable. There would be a national shaming of colleges and universities for charging soaring tuition rates that are reaching lunatic levels.
The rapacity of American colleges and universities is turning social mobility, the keystone of American freedom, into a commodified farce. Instead of guaranteeing loans, the government would have to guarantee a college education. There are a lot of people who could learn to live with that, too.
What do you think is the strongest best point that Siegel makes? Identify and paraphrase the specific passage where this point appears. Where does Siegel acknowledge readers who might disagree with his argument or challenge it? Refer to specific paragraphs. Note places where Siegel uses the word life: for example, in paragraph 4. How, in each instance, does he seem to define this word?
Do his definitions seem logical to you? In paragraphs 14 and 15, Siegel uses the pronoun you. Why, do you think? How is this choice of pronoun strategic? Is it possible for readers to criticize Siegel for defaulting and yet still agree with certain parts of his essay? How sincere does Siegel seem when he encourages his readers to default on their student loans? Do you believe that a significant portion of his readers would see him as indeed calling for them to break the law?
The second selection originally appeared in the August 23—29, , issue of the New Statesman, a long-established weekly British news and opinion magazine. The author, Sophia McDougall b. She is, however, chiefly a novelist. She has gained particular attention for her Romanitas trilogy, the first volume of which was published in These novels offer an alternate history in which the Roman Empire has lasted up to the present.
Begun in , this multivolume series depicts the adventures of four children and their dog. The one girl in the group is Georgina, more commonly known as George. This might seem an odd thing to say, because I love many female characters in popular culture who exhibit resilience and courage. She is strong! See, she kicks people in the face. Is, say, Sherlock Holmes strong?
In one sense, yes: he faces danger and death in order to pursue justice. Yet he is often unreliable — and as an addict and a depressive he even claims his crime-fighting is a form of self-medication.
So is Sherlock Holmes strong? Their strength lets them, briefly, dominate bystanders but never dominate the plot. What do I want instead? I want a male-to-female character ratio of instead of on our screens. I want a wealth of complex female protagonists who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness. And besides heroines, I want to see women in as many and as varied secondary roles as men: female sidekicks, mentors, comic relief, rivals, villains.
In other words, equality. How accurate does McDougall strike you as she refers to specific characters or types of characters in popular culture? What examples can you think of that support or challenge her argument? McDougall is good at paragraph transitions. After her introduction, she connects the start of each paragraph to the paragraph that comes before it.
What are the specific ways she does this? Should she have dropped it, then? What, basically, does she mean by it? How realistic is she when she calls for popular culture to practice equality in her sense of the term? Most people would say that literature consists of fiction novels as well as short stories , poetry, and drama.
But limiting the term to these genres can be misleading. After all, they connect to everyday life. Often they employ ordinary forms of talk and blend them with less common ones. Also, things that function as symbols in stories, poems, and plays may do so in daily conversation. As we speak with one another, we may associate fire with passion, water with life, evening with death. Throughout the day, actually, people put literary genres into practice.
Perhaps you have commented on situations by quoting a song lyric or citing a line of verse. No doubt you are often theatrical, following scripts and performing roles. Certainly you tell stories.
Imagine this scenario: a traffic jam has made you late for a class; now, you must explain your delay. You may relate a tale of suspense, with you the hero struggling to escape the bumper-to-bumper horde.
Almost all of us spin narratives day after day, because doing so helps us meaningfully frame our existence. But this tendency is distinctly modern, for the term literature has not always been applied so restrictively.
Literature was at first a characteristic of readers. People of literature were assumed to be well read. Increasingly it referred to books and other printed texts rather than to people who read them. At the beginning of this shift, the scope of literature was broad, encompassing nearly all public writing. More and more people considered literature to be imaginative or creative writing, which they distinguished from nonfiction. This trend did take years to build; in the early s, literature anthologies still featured nonfiction such as essays and excerpts from histories and biographies.
By the mids, though, the narrower definition of literature prevailed. This limited definition has become vulnerable. From the early s, a number of literature faculty have called for widening it.
Participants studied essays, letters, diaries, autobiographies, and oral testimonies. Of course, even within these three categories, the term literature has been selectively applied. Take the case of novelist and short-story writer Stephen King, whose books have sold millions of copies.
Yet people who use the term literature as a compliment may still disagree about whether a certain text deserves it. In short, artistic standards differ. To be sure, some works have been constantly admired through the years; regarded as classics, they are frequently taught in literature classes. Hamlet and other plays by William Shakespeare are obvious examples.
But in the last twenty years, much controversy has arisen over the literary canon, those works taught again and again. Are there good reasons why the canon has consisted mostly of works by white men? Or have the principles of selection been skewed by sexism and racism? Should the canon be changed to accommodate a greater range of authors? Or should literary studies resist having any canon at all? These questions have provoked various answers and continued debate.
Also in question are attempts to separate literature from nonfiction. Much nonfiction shows imagination and relies on devices found in novels, short stories, poems, and plays. The last few years have seen emerge the term creative nonfiction as a synonym for essays, histories, and journalistic accounts that use evocative language and strong narratives. Conversely, works of fiction, poetry, and drama may stem from real-life events.
A note of caution is in order, though. It differs in certain ways. Indeed, the character is too distressed to write a story as Gilman herself did. Rather, she transformed it. So her artistic strategies merit study, especially since she could have tapped her experience in other ways.
Some people argue that literature about real events is still literary because it inspires contemplation rather than action. True, not every work of literature is so conspicuously action oriented. But even when a text seems more geared toward reflection, it may move readers to change their behavior.
In our book, we resist endorsing a single definition of literature. Rather, we encourage you to review and perhaps rethink what the term means to you. At the same time, to expand the realm of literature, we include several essays in addition to short stories, poems, and plays. We also present numerous critical commentaries as well as various historical documents.
Throughout the book, we invite you to make connections among these different kinds of texts. You need not treat them as altogether separate species.
We assume you are reading this book in a course aimed at helping you write. Quite likely the course is meant to prepare you for writing assignments throughout college, including papers in fields beyond English. Much academic writing is, in fact, based on reading. Many classes will ask you to produce essays that analyze published texts. Together, these acts of analysis and synthesis have been called reading closely, a process we explain and model in Chapter 4.
We encourage you to practice this method with the selections in our book. The purpose of your paper will be to help other readers of the text grasp its meanings and, perhaps, judge its worth. Literature is a good training ground for these skills of interpretation and evaluation. The poems, stories, plays, and essays in this book repeatedly invite inquiry. Rather, they offer puzzles, complications, metaphors, symbols, and mysteries, thereby recognizing that life is complex.
Furthermore, much literature can help you understand your own life and conduct it better. Some people dislike literature because they find it too vague and indirect. They resent that it often forces them to figure out symbols and implications when they would rather have ideas presented outright. One of the best books I've ever read. Exploring Literature invites students to connect with works of literature in light of their own experiences and, ultimately, put those connections into writing.
With engaging selections, provocative themes, and comprehensive coverage of the writing process, Madden's anthology is sure to capture the reader's imagination. Exploring Literature opens with five chapters dedicated to reading and writing about literature.
An anthology follows, organized around five themes. Each thematic unit includes a rich diversity of short stories, poems, plays, and essays, as well as a case study to help students explore literature from various perspectives.
It's the great world novel! This is the international story of our times. On this side too, there are dreams.
She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with a few books he would like to buy--two of them her favorites.
Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia's husband's tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same. Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence.
Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia--trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier's reach doesn't extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something.
But what exactly are they running to? American Dirt will leave readers utterly changed. It is a literary achievement filled with poignancy, drama, and humanity on every page. It is one of the most important books for our times. Already being hailed as "a Grapes of Wrath for our times" and "a new American classic," Jeanine Cummins's American Dirt is a rare exploration into the inner hearts of people willing to sacrifice everything for a glimmer of hope.
The Great Gatsby is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nick Carraway is a young veteran and Yale graduate who moves to New York in search of work. He rents a bungalow on Long Island next door to the extravagant mansion of Jay Gatsby, a magnanimous millionaire with a mysterious past. There, he reconnects with his distant cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan, a flagrant philanderer who brings Nick to the city in order to spend time with Myrtle, his impoverished mistress.
Soon, he receives an invitation to a party at the Gatsby mansion, where he gets terribly drunk and meets his neighbor, who swears they served together in the Great War. As time goes by, the two begin a tenuous friendship bolstered by stories of the war and a mutual fondness for alcohol.
The Great Gatsby is a tragic tale of ambition and romance set in the Roaring Twenties, a decade born from war and lost to economic disaster.
With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this new edition of F. Since it was first launched in , Amazon has changed the world of literature. In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction. Charting a course spanning from Henry James to E. James, McGurl shows that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution.
This consumerist logic—if you like this, you might also like This is an innovation to be cautiously celebrated. Here all fiction is genre fiction, and the niches range from the categories of crime and science fiction to the more refined interests of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica.
Everything and Less is a hilarious and insightful map of both the commanding heights and sordid depths of fiction, past and present, that opens up an arresting conversation about why it is we read and write fiction in the first place. Auden once wrote that "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
The modern solution to our problems is to surround ourselves only with what we know and what brings us instant comfort. Jacobs's answer is the opposite: to be in conversation with, and challenged by, those from the past who can tell us what we never thought we needed to know.
What can Homer teach us about force? And what can we learn from modern authors who engage passionately and profoundly with the past? How can Ursula K. Le Guin show us truths about Virgil's female characters that Virgil himself could never have seen?
By hearing the voices of the past, we can expand our consciousness, our sympathies, and our wisdom far beyond what our present moment can offer. The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.
His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
The classic dystopian novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit stands alongside Orwell's and Huxley's Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization's enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity. Bradbury's powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which, decades on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
A tour de force from acclaimed author Alan Gratz Prisoner B , this timely -- and timeless -- novel tells the powerful story of three different children seeking refuge. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.
George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his magnetic performances, sharp wit, and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in STAR TREK, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.
In , at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. THEY CALLED US ENEMY is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.
What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? Skip to content. Arguing About Literature.
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